Paul

www . skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm

You already are aware that 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record, having been surpassed by both 2005 and, so far, 2010, yes?

You mention the alleged controversy of “Climategate”, yet four investigations have revealed no wrong doing, and in fact those investigations point to the strength of the science of the study of AGW.

You mention “The planet also cooled from 1945-75″. Did you not also find that the Clean Air Act of 1975 had a major impact on global temps by removing particulates from the atmosphere, thus removing a masking effect on global heating? Our industrial processes during the period 1945 - 1975 were overwhelming the warming of the planet due to the air pollution we were producing. The particulate matter in the pollution acted to reflect the suns warming of the planet. Once the Nixon Administration passed the Clean Air Act, the next 5 - 10 years saw a demonstrable decrease of air pollution, and we now know that global temps began to rise significantly. This is what has our scientists so very worried!

You write: “And, speaking of short periods of time on which to be drawing conclusions: the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, correlating carbon dioxide increases with temperature increases, is based on only about 23 years–1975-1998. This is hardly a long enough period of time to be drawing long-term conclusions that might well wreck industrial civilization with poorly thought-out carbon curbs. Correlation, as you well know, doesn’t equal causation.”

Sounds plausible…until we look at the facts. “The SCIENCE says that temperatures did not rise from the mid-30s to the mid-70s because of sulfate aerosols in fossil fuels. And what happened in the mid-70s? Clean-air legislation, and more importantly the phasing out of sulfur-rich fuels.”

I find it difficult at best to comprehend your position on human-induced climate change, given the fact that every science academy across the globe, including the NAS, AAAS, AMA, AMS, AGU, and countless other scientific bodies, ALL agree that AGW is happening, it is already bad, it is going to get worse, and we should be doing everything in our power to cut down our emissions of greenhouse gases and pollution in general.

What would it take to convince you, Paul?

-Best,
-sTv

First, the world is, overall and on average, warming, because we are in an interglacial. We’ll know the interglacial is over when the world starts cooling again, on average, although that’s what happened during the Little Ice Age (1350-1850). After that, the planet warmed without significant human carbon emissions to blame, so what caused it? The planet also cooled from 1945-75, to the point where some climatologists (notably Stephen Schneider) warned of an impending ice age.

And, speaking of short periods of time on which to be drawing conclusions: the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, correlating carbon dioxide increases with temperature increases, is based on only about 23 years–1975-1998. This is hardly a long enough period of time to be drawing long-term conclusions that might well wreck industrial civilization with poorly thought-out carbon curbs. Correlation, as you well know, doesn’t equal causation.

So, again, I fully recognize that, on average, we are still in a warming trend, and some of it may be human-caused. The questions I have are: 1) how much influence do humans actually have on this warming? I’d say very little, and if we are on the ‘down’ cycle of this interglacial, then good! Do we really want the planet getting colder? And 2), why did the planet stop warming from about 1998 to now, and perhaps beyond?

Why “cherry-pick” 1998 to now? Because the IPCC models all, without exception, predicted that the last decade would be much warmer than it was. I know NOAA says the decade saw warming of .2°C, but it’s fairly obvious that this number was a result of some major “adjustments” to the models, given that, as noted in the blog above, everyone, including major climate alarmists like Phil Jones and Tim Flannery, had accepted that the planet did not warm, on average, for the decade. Then, all of a sudden, we’re up .2°C? Meanwhile, the NOAA report’s “highlights” (summary) shows warming of .2° Fahrenheit for the decade, or .11°C, which strikes me as a bit more realistic, if still too high.

And, as noted above, according to NOAA the globe was .6°C warmer than the U.S., which was down .4°C for 2000-2009, according to NOAA’s own figures. .6°C is the whole warming for the 20th century, and yet a decade that saw, for most of the years, no overall warming and even some cooling, driving climate alarmists to distraction, went up a third of the 20th century warming? Does this make sense?

What I draw from this decade of non-warming, and why I think it is significant, is that it reveals that the climate models are not as accurate as we are told. Meanwhile, the NOAA report shows that climate alarmists (and NOAA belongs in this category) are still, as the Climategate emails revealed very clearly, willing to lie with statistics to get the warming the models predict.

None of this gives me any confidence in anything that climate alarmist organizations like NOAA and the IPCC have to say on the topic. In short, a healthy does of skepticism is in order for anyone approaching this topic.

As long as climatologists adjust satellite data for an expected, pre-supposed “cool bias,” the question will never go away.

As long as climatologists extrapolate temperature data from Seattle, or Toronto to show temperatures in the arctic, because we “just don’t have enough weather stations,” the question will never go away.

As long as climatologists allow politicians and corporations to dictate what science they will pursue, the question will never go away.

As long as we label people “warmists” and “denialists,” and argue the matter in the halls of propaganda, instead of the halls of science, the question will never go away.

Folks are more interested in being “Right,” than they are in being accurate.

The reason the models aren’t showing what the propagandists would like for them to show, is that those models are operating on certain false presumptions.

A really good model will evaluate everything under the sun, and not seek to either exclude or presume that only a few things are the cause for a particular result.

The modelers are essentially lazy —and dare I say dishonest— people, because they don’t want to expend the time and effort necessary to collect the virtual plethora of data which would negate their entirely false hypothesis.

They don’t want to expend all that time, only to have their favorite ideas sunk and reduced to insignificance, once the facts are actually known about matters.

If they actually DID take the time to construct a scientifically complete model, they wouldn’t be able to expend lots of face on TEE VEE and the MSM press, because they’d be too busy doing REAL science.

So, they rant and rave, wave their arms all about, prognosticate doom and gloom, get all emotional (that’s an important aspect here because it helps their propaganda effort), point fingers, call names, and tell us ‘its for the children!!’ ‘We’re all gonna dieeeee!!!’

The very worst part is that many people have been propagandized endlessly by the MSM, and when the climate propagandists declare that ‘it’s warmer now than ever before,’ why the many people proceed to believe the declaration, even if it’s actually cooler.

The modelers know all that, and so have no impetus to change.

This data set; that data set; proxie data sets; warming some; cooling some; blah, blah, blah. We are in an integlacial epoch. We don’t know if we’re still going into one, or already coming out of one. Doesn’t matter, because all the policy mandates the world’s governments might impose won’t change that a bit, and certainly won’t lock the earth’s climate at the present conditions.

Patrickdj, you made that unsubstantiated leap that irks me so. Something is going on - therefore, it is proven that man-made CO2 emiisions are the sole, or dominant cause. Here, the scientific method suffers the worst.

Meantime I am being told all the raw data and computer programs are available from CRU so others can check the work and think around it. Is this so - and will they give it out? I cannot do this but it would be nice to know others are. I have not read Einstein felt it necessary to keep his workings a closely guarded secret. Yet his theories of general and special relativity appear to be good. A bit different to AGW?

Yes, the “independence” has already been thoroughly debunked. The raw data are not independent; they get that wrong, and all 3 “sources” are wrong from the beginning.

Agreed. Sixty year cyclical trends. You and I seem to know about them, so they can’t be some great mystery. You’d think they’d be built into the climate models, yet the models aren’t agreeing with the empirical observations. Explain that.

As for the period 2000 to 2009, wow such a short period used to justify your denialist misleading information. Tell me, why didn’t you pick the nearly 40 years from 1944 to tell us there has been a cooling period, or the nearly 60 years from 1878 which showed a cooling trend? The fact of the matter is that each of these “cooling” trends are all part of a larger picture and if you look at that larger picture the FACT of the matter is, the world is steadily warming and this extra warming is due to the presence of the extra CO2 mankind is pumping into the atmosphere.